For another, some reviewers found it dull, flat, wooden, pretentious and, most of all, juvenile: they complained about the absence of politics, sex-and anything else that they thought could possibly hold the interest of an adult audience.įor example, in a scathing 1956 review entitled “Oo, Those Awful Orcs!,” the essayist and critic Edmund Wilson wrote that “Tolkien has little skill at narrative and no instinct for literary form” he calls The Lord of the Rings “a children’s book which had somehow got out of hand.” And, in 1961, Philip Toynbee wrote in the London Observer that he was relieved to find that the popularity of these “dull, ill-written, whimsical and childish” books seemed to be fading: “Most of his more ardent supporters were soon beginning to sell out their shares in Professor Tolkien, and to-day those books have passed into a merciful oblivion.”

For one thing, back then, a long fantasy novel intended for adult readers-though Tolkien called it a “heroic romance”-was a strange thing. Although many critics of the time praised the trilogy, others weren’t entirely sure what to make of it. The current level of enthusiasm for the world of Middle Earth would have been hard to predict back in 1955, when the final volume of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy-a sequel to his 1937 children’s book, The Hobbit-was published. Given the size and enthusiasm of The Lord of the Rings’ fanbase, it is unsurprising that Amazon has invested what industry watchers have estimated as hundreds of millions of dollars to enable them to produce the series-even though the storyline will not be solely based on the book itself but will draw on material in various Tolkien appendices, lesser-known works and unpublished-even unfinished-manuscripts. Tolkien’s Middle Earth-a world previously seen on screen in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings (released 2001–2003) and The Hobbit (released 2012–2014)-but it will be a kind of prequel-set in a time before the events depicted in those films.

The series promises to return viewers to the fantasy world of J. A commercial for Amazon’s forthcoming TV series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, aired during this year’s Super Bowl, racked up a record 257 million views online in 24 hours.

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